Charles Saumarez Smith is Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Arts. His most recent book is The Company of Artists: The Origins of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, published by Modern Art Press and Bloomsbury. Read more

Victoria Schofield is a writer and commentator on South Asian politics. She has written several articles for The Spectator and is the author of Bhutto: Trial and Execution and Afghan Frontier: Feuding and Fighting in Central Asia.

Francesca Segal has written for Granta, the Daily Telegraph, the Observer, the Financial Times and the Jewish Chronicle. She is currently a features writer at Tatler, and is the Observer's Debut Fiction columnist.

Richard Shannon is the retired Professor Emeritus of Modern History at University of Wales Swansea. He has published extensively on 19th-century British history. His most recent book is Gladstone: God and Politics (Continuum, 2007). Read more

Robin Shepherd founded The Commentator website, and is the Director of International Affairs at the Henry Jackson Society. His latest book is A State Beyond the Pale: Europe's Problem with Israel (Weidenfeld & Nicholson).

James Shinn was US Assistant Secretary of Defense from 2007-8, with prime policy responsibility for Afghanistan. He previously served in the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department, and teaches at Princeton University.

Amity Shlaes won the International Policy Network's Bastiat Prize for Journalism in 2002 for her work in the Financial Times. She is the author of The Forgotten Man: a New History of the Great Depression.

Brendan Simms is Professor of the History of International Relations at the University of Cambridge. He is author of Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia (Penguin)and Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy (Allen Lane).

Lord Skidelsky, the biographer of Keynes, is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Warwick. Tim Congdon is a former adviser to the Treasury and a founder of Lombard Street Research. Read more

A new documentary made in Afghanistan has won two awards at the the Sundance Film Festival. Afghan Star could help the cause of feminism there and encourage a desperately-needed sense of national community Read more

Cita Stelzer is a freelance editor and journalist. She is a researcher at Churchill College, Cambridge. Her most recent book is Dinner with Churchill: Policy-making at the Dinner Table (Pegasus Books). Read more

Norman Stone is Professor of International Relations at Bilkent University, Ankara, and also lives in Oxford, where he was Professor of Modern History until 1997. Jeremy Black is a Professor of History at the University of Exeter.

Gisela Stuart has been the Labour MP for Birmingham Edgbaston since 1997. A former health minister, she is a trustee of the Henry Jackson Society and is also editor of the parliamentary weekly political House Magazine.

Andrew Stuttaford works in the international financial markets, and writes frequently about cultural and political issues in a number of US publications. He is a contributing editor of National Review Online.